American Graduate

Southern Education Desk

Printing New Skin

Video Overview

By modifying an ink jet printer and growing skin cells taken from a patient's body, a U.S. Army research lab has developed an amazing treatment for severe burns: printing new skin. Once the patient's skin cells are in a sterile ink cartridge, a computer uses a three dimensional map of the wound to guide the printing. “The bio-printer drops each type of cell precisely where it needs to go," explains Kyle Binder, a biomedical scientist at the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine's Wake Forest lab. "The wound gets filled in and then those cells will become new skin.”